Forgiveness
by Treenahasthaal
Summary: He has forgiven many in his life, but now he finds himself unable to forgive the one person he should...


**AN:** This is a different style than I usually write and is a very short, choppy (deliberately so to try and catch the sense of a disjointed, emotionally affected thought process). It was written for the SB group on yahoo (used to be SSB...), but it was especially written for her High Empress... she knows who she is! : )

Many, many thanks to Kataja for beta reading...

I add, too, that I am only playing in Lucas's sand box and my only profit is fun! : )

**Forgiveness.**

I'm supposed to be good at forgiving and yet, at this moment, I have no idea what forgiveness is or what it feels like.

Is it release?

Absolution?

Mercy?

Exoneration?

Or is it something entirely different?

I forgave my father.

So I'm told.

I'm not sure if I really did forgive him. Perhaps I just accepted him for what he was.

The Dark Lord of the Sith.

I abhorred what he was.

And yet, I loved him for being my father.

He saved me in the end and, I think, I hope, I helped save him. He died in light and in absolution.

That I should be so lucky.

I forgave my teachers of their lies and deceit and rationalised that they had their reasons. They saved me, saved my sister, from an uncertain future after our birth and set our feet on more righteous paths.

How they must be reeling now, how they must despair that my path is growing dark once more.

I have been forgiven for past transgressions. I tread the path of darkness and stood beside Palpatine's clone as I struggled to grasp what had drawn my father in so tightly and I almost became lost to the bleak and beckoning night.

My pain, my anger and my actions of the past few days belong to the shadows that I have fought these many years to repel, and I fear that they will trail at my heels for the remainder of my days.

I even forgave our enemies for infecting you. I forgave them as you struggled to live and fought the toxins within and I loved you for your tenacity and strength.

I forgave them for disrupting our lives; for keeping us apart for long times, for forcing us to hide our new born son and allowing others to raise him in our place; forcing him to endure a childhood without his parents. It is something that I will always regret; that I was unable to be a father to him when he needed me most.

I forgave you many times, too.

Remember Myrk? Remember how you hated me, how you wanted to kill me?

I forgave you and you saved me, even as I saved you.

But, I cannot forgive this, I...

"_Dad?"_

No, I cannot.

Even as our son calls through the Force to me. Even as he senses the emotions that I am sending out so strongly, even as he comes to me to seek succour and strength that I am unable to offer him, I will not forgive you.

I cannot forgive you, Mara.

Not now, not this time and I cannot forgive the one who forced this upon us.

This emptiness.

This unending, unrelenting agony.

This desolation that has been left in your wake.

I want to hold you close and smell your hair. I want to feel your body against mine. I want to feel your heart beat against my chest.

I want you to call me "Skywalker" and "farmboy" and hear you mock me for being naive as you have done so often.

I want to hear you laugh...

"Dad?"

I don't want to turn around. I don't want to look at our son.

I will only see you, I will only see what I have lost.

"Yes, Ben?"

"It's time, Dad."

Time.

Time to gather and mourn.

I'm so angry at you for leaving us.

For leaving me.

"Dad?"

His hand on my shoulder; unsure and tentative.

Our son.

"Dad?"

And I hear the pain in his voice, his confusion at the loss of his mother, his bewilderment at his father's reaction. He feels so alone, Mara...

Deserted and discarded. Grieving and yet trying to be so strong.

Unlike his father who stands faltering under the weight of his grief, under the weight of a loss he was ill prepared for, the weight of an anger that saps his strength and leaves him wanton and wretched.

Mara...

My love.

My life.

I cannot forgive you for abandoning me, abandoning Ben, even though I know that you fought with all your strength to stay.

I cannot feel you.

I reach out for you, but all I grasp in the Force is empty space.

There is no sense of you.

Your body remains; denied to the Force for reasons that baffle me. So I will stand with our son beside your pyre and watch you burn.

"I know, Ben. It's time..."

Mara...

I cannot forgive you this, for if I do, it would mean that I accept that you are gone and I'm not ready to do that. I'm not ready to let you go and, because of that, I doubt that I will ever feel forgiveness again.

_Don't be mad at me, farmboy..._

ooOOoo_  
_


End file.
